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Martin Brinkley's Acceptance Speech
Article Date: Tuesday, June 15, 2010
North Carolina Bar Association
Acceptance of Election as President-Elect
June 26, 2010
Martin H. Brinkley
The grace our family usually says at mealtimes begins: “Give us grateful hearts, Our Father, for these and all Thy mercies.”
This is an occasion when my heart is so grateful – to so many, for so many mercies – that to give a just account of it all is beyond my powers.
The Past Presidents, with your assent, have laid in my hands what I hold to be a sacred trust. It is a trust which each of them, according to his or her own lights, has discharged with steeliness of purpose and fixity of heart. Their unflagging dedication to our great Bar Association cannot but exhilarate one who looks up at the mountaintop where they sit, and sees face after face that has breathed life into the best and highest ideals of our profession. I will strive, however inadequately, to emulate them.
I am blessed to be part of a law firm that still rejects the corrupting notion that a lawyer is the merest utensil of a client’s will, a firm that still believes the practice of law is a calling to revere, a thing that makes good citizens and good human beings. My partners have tried, across the broad span of nearly a hundred years, to hold the flame of that belief undimmed. I am proud to be one of them, and I hope to make them proud of me.
I am thankful to have had the chance to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the counsel and wisdom of friends, two of the dearest of whom, Steve Mason and Bill Whichard, you have heard this morning seconding the Past Presidents’ nomination. Many of you are also among their number. I will work to make good use of what you have taught me.
I ask the best parents any man ever had, Sherrill and Susan Brinkley, to stand. Mother and Dad, for the love and security you gave us, and most of all for leaving me free to choose my own way and pursue my own road, I honor you. It is likewise a privilege to introduce to you the other lawyers in my family – my brother Dewey, who defends people about to confront the law at its most terrifying out of an office directly across Hargett Street from my own, and his wife Nicole, both members of the Wake County bar.
God has given Carol and me the gift and heritage of three beautiful, healthy, and pugnaciously independent children. They are their own persons, through and through, and are patient with and kind to their father on the understanding that he is prepared regularly and penitently to confess his faults: Eliza, a rising senior at Saint Mary’s School in Raleigh; Caroline, a rising sophomore at Saint Mary’s; and Sam, a fifth grader at Frances Lacy Elementary School. Would you three please stand?
Given what Charles Becton has told you about my interest in the ancient world, you may be less shocked than otherwise to learn that I carry a Greek Homer in my briefcase as a source of inspiration and a weapon against sloth. For me, the culmination of the Odyssey occurs in Book 23, when Odysseus is tearfully reunited with Penelope after a 20 years’ separation. At line 232, the poet says that Odysseus wept, holding his alochos thumares. Now this is one of those phrases that makes the translator throw down his pen in despair. The Greek means something like “a bride that fits the heart.” I have always thought it the aptest description of how I feel about my own heart-fitted bride, Carol, who spends much of her time trying to remind me that the fiercest joy is in the living. I ask her to stand and receive my humble thanks.
We have not inherited an easy world in which to forge steadfast another link in the chain of our ancient and noble profession. Yet if we brace ourselves to our duty and promise to be what my first boss and the best lawyer I have ever known, Chief Judge Sam J. Ervin, III, called “dues paying members of humanity,” I have every hope and faith that we will prove once more, as Justice Holmes said, that it is possible to live greatly in the law. I pledge the future of our Bar Association, and every sinew of myself, to that task, which demands – and deserves – nothing less than all we have to give.
Thank you very much.